New Details About The ‘Black Widow’ Solo Film Revealed

Some new details about the highly-anticipated Black Widow have surfaced courtesy of Jeremy Conrad from MCU Cosmic. According to him, the Black Widow film, which we originally reported to be a prequel, will tackle the 90s phenomenon known as the Y2K bug.

According to the rumor, the Y2K bug on December 31, 1999 will play some part in the plot of Black Widow. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, it was confirmed that Natasha Romanoff was born in 1984; so that would make her 16 at the time of Y2K. Based that age and on the flashbacks in Avengers: Age of Ultron, that would place her still under the control of the Red Room and likely not with S.H.I.E.L.D..

For young readers of ours, the Y2K bug started a hysteria that we old timers got to experience. What it was was a technological crisis that coincided with the turn of the millennium. People were anticipating that computers wouldn’t recognize the numerical value of 2000, therefore, causing major problems with stored data and such. Some conspiracy theorists believed the Y2K bug to be a sign of the end times. It’s not clear on how this narrative device fits in the film but as Conrad mentioned in his post, the idea of the MCU retroactively shaping what we’ve come to know as Y2K to fit in their superhero universe is exciting. We can imagine all kinds of crazy comic book threats being the catalyst for such a real-world phenomenon.

We first broke the story that the film would see Natasha Romanoff in the early 2000s. If they’re using the Y2K phenomenon as a prologue to Natasha’s story, then we could very well see more of her history as one of the Red Room’s assassins, something that fans have been clamoring for a while now.